[604] For it see [Appendix IX].
The battle and the massacre proper had barely ended when the dreary work of torture began. It had been stipulated by Captain Heald that the lives of the prisoners should be spared, but this agreement was promptly violated. We cannot speak with much assurance of the details of the tortures, but concerning the main fact there is no doubt. One man. Burns, who had been wounded in the battle, was killed by a squaw about an hour after its conclusion.[605] Possibly this is the man whom Mrs. Helm refers to as having been stabbed to death with a stable fork in her presence.[606] In Judge Woodward's letter to General Proctor upon the survivors of the massacre, Burns is spoken of as a "citizen," and he is similarly designated in Helm's account of the massacre. A letter of Sergeant Griffith to Captain Heald in 1820 clears up the question of his identity.[607] It shows that he was a sergeant in the Chicago militia, enrolled by Heald after the murders at the Lee farm in April, 1812. It confirms the fact of his death at the hands of his captors after the surrender, and incidentally throws a pleasing light upon his character, recalling to Heald's mind "the Soldierlike conduct of ... Burns while engaged with an unequal force of Savages, and the manner in which he was inhumanly murdered (in your presence) after he was a prisoner." The Wau Bun narrative represents the Burns family as living at the time of the massacre on the north bank of the river some distance above the Kinzie house.[608] Apparently Burns was a discharged soldier who had made Chicago his permanent home, for the Fort Dearborn muster-roll for November, 1810, shows that he was then a member of the garrison and that his term of enlistment would expire in June, 1811.
[605] Letter of Sergeant Griffith to Heald, January 13, 1820, Draper Collection, U, VIII, 88; Judge Woodward to Proctor, October 7, 1812, Appendix VII.
[606] Kinzie, Wau Bun, 176.
[607] Cited supra, note 605.
[608] Kinzie, Wau Bun, 155, 159.
The various accounts generally agree that a number of the prisoners were put to death during the night following the massacre. Judge Woodward's letter to Proctor, which, written October 7, 1812, and based on information given by Heald and Sergeant Griffith, is the most reliable source of information on this particular point, states that five soldiers were known to have been put to death at this time. The Wau Bun narrative, written many years later, makes the same statement. The Darius Heald narrative states that the Indians were believed to have gone off down the lake shore on the evening of the massacre day to have a "general frolic," torturing the wounded soldiers. Woodward gives the names of two of these victims, Richard Garner and James Latta, both private soldiers. By a process of comparison of all the sources concerning those who perished in captivity we get the names of the other three, Micajah Denison, John Fury, and Thomas Poindexter.[609] But one account attempts to tell us how they died, and this, of more than dubious validity, suggests rather than describes their fate. A half-breed Frenchwoman, who had remained in her hut on the north side of the river during the battle and massacre, made her way after its conclusion to a point opposite the Indian village north of the fort. Here she could see the "torture ground" where the squaws had three men, and the warriors one white woman, undergoing the most fearful torture and indignities, "such as she had never heard of in Canada."[610] Perhaps after all it is just as well that we have no more detailed description. The fate of the victims was no more awful than that customarily meted out to the vanquished white man in the course of his contest with the red man for the possession of this continent and it is better that the gory details should sink into oblivion.
[609] For the way in which these names are determined see [Appendix IX].
[610] Head Papers, in Chicago Historical Society library.
On the day after the massacre, the fort having been burned and the plunder and the prisoners divided, the bands began to scatter to their various homes. The dreary story of the hardships endured by the captives and the indignities and cruelties meted out to them by their masters is relieved, happily, now and then by some act of kindness or generosity calculated to prove that gentleness and humanity were qualities not entirely unknown, even to the savage red man. Ultimately the majority of the prisoners were to find their way back to civilization, but for several death offered the only avenue of escape from their captivity. For some, indeed, death must have come as a welcome relief from sufferings far more dreadful.